The High Altar of the Conspiratorium Clerisy

Monthly Archives: February 2014

The other night we had a number of students come through the newsroom as part of a field trip, I suppose. They were most polite and inquisitive and optimistic and it took everything in my power not to ask them the hard questions. Like what constitutes news and is there anything called bias? Bias both in slant but also in terms of underreporting so as to not alarm or inflame the people. Think the soft soap. I hadn’t the heart. That’s why I’d probably make a lousy teacher because before I explained the rudiments of anything I’d be going for the exceptions and conditions and the throat. And I love the idea of the news and of being informed and being sentient and connected to the world as an active participant. But there’s so much news and data and information that should be disregarded altogether much like one would discard a nutritionless, tasteless mound of fried carbohydrate. It may seem filling but after the glycemic spike hits, you feel the bottomless drop of attention and concentration. And don’t get me started with their hi-tech gadgetry that they were tethered to. And that I am as well. They hadn’t the foggiest notion of what surveillance meant, especially that of voluntary surveillance. Subjecting yourself to Orwellian dystopic jewelry and not even having the vaguest, faintest, slightest idea of what being thrust on the 24/7 real-time panopticon. They would have thought me the loon. And why not? Because the more you know, the crazier you look.

The Kill Switch

One of the most important stories bar none is the internet kill switch. And what inspired that reference and thought was Ellen and her record-breaking Oscar selfie. Instantaneously, it was all over the world. That’s why Twitter is the most dangerous instrument on the plant today and furthermore why it’ll be the first thing shut down during upheaval, uprising and tumult.